Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Google pulls out of Mainland China

Before the departure Google maintained about 35% of search market in China, second after Baidu's 60%+. It's a distant second, but Google.cn is making money and progress on its market share. Therefore it's not hard to come to the conclusion that the decision on leaving Chinese mainland isn't a business-based decision as what Chinese state media is propagating.

Google has been under constant cyber attack from China. Operation Aurora was a large scale one and attracted wide media coverage, but hacking of individual accounts has been going on for quite a while. Many Chinese human right activists and foreign journalists stationed in China have the experience that their gmail account is secretly redirected to another account.

Even worse, Google's four year in China has also been subject to varies accusations made by Chinese state media. China's State Broadcaster, CCTV, once accused Google of "spreading unhealthy information to the country's teenagers", but Chinese netizens have soon discovered that the person ("victim") interviewed in the programme is nothing but a CCTV intern.

I'm not against censorship, but the Chinese authority has a long history of abusing this tool for communist party's own good. In an environment where there is no independent media, Internet neutrality is vital for people to access unbiased and factual information. Not in China. The dispute between Google and Chinese authority has been going on for more than two month now, but even the Chinese authority are unable to specify which Law Google has violated - What they want Google and other Chinese websites to do cannot be put under public eyes.

What Google have done today is nothing more than corrects the mistake it has made 4 years ago, but it has created a far greater impact today than if it had never entered the Chinese market. By taking this simple but definitive act of defiance, Google has told the world that money cannot buy everything, and Chinese government cannot hold its own 1.4 billion people to ransom and use it to ask  the western world to obey.

And for that, I applaud Google's courageous decision.  I also want to see other foreign internet companies in China, especially Microsoft and its search engine bing are reacting to this news. Will they also do the right thing, or continuing act like Marx has described – capitalists will do everything to maximise the profit.

Dates not allowed on Google (.cn)'s Calendar

As you may know, Google's Chinese localised version is heavily censored.  When the search results contain pages you are not allowed to see, Google.cn usually returns a notice on the result page : "据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示" (Some results are omitted as restrited by local laws and policies).

One curious Chinese bloger wondered, how many days in a year are outlawed by "local laws"? He worte a script and found out that, out of 366 days, 11 of them will result the censorship notice on the search result page, these are:

* 13 January
* 31 May
* 4 June
* 13 June
* 20 June
* 25 June
* 30 June
* 5 July
* 19 September
* 13 Octorber
* 18 December

The rationale behind some of these censored dates are quite obvious, like 4 June is the date symbolises Tiananmen Square Massacre and the recent riots in China's Uyghur dominated Xinjiang Region started on 5 July.

However, even as a politically minded Chinese, I don't quite get why the rest of dates are considered "sensitive". I checked Wikipedia, there are some past events related to China, however, most of them are quite normal and can be hardly considered as sensitive events.

Google: It's a dangerous world out there

I was searching stuffs for my essay this morning, and suddenly this happened. In fact, every single result was flagged by Google as a site with "malwares". The glitches lasted for about half an hour.

Google fixed and explained what was hapened quite fast. According their blog, when they were updating the blacklist, the value " / " was accidentally checked as an identifier for sites with malwares, and of course, every URL got that slash.

Googling Google

Google today released the fastest rising and highest volume search terms recorded in New Zealand in 2008. I don't want to repeat the whole list, you can see it here.

However, I have found the list somewhat strange, first it's in the news, but you cannot find anything in Google Zeitgeist, where Google usually publish these stuffs.

The other one is, Google itself is placed sixth of the list. after "Trademe", but before "TV".

Here's my interpretation. There's a trend that, especially among the young people, when you want to visit facebook, very few people actually type facebook.com: what they do is type google.com, then search  facebook. They also tend to ignore the "I'm feeling lucky" button, which may save them 5 seconds.

I also understand some people don't even bother to type google.com, instead, they just ask "google" in the address bar. Most of modern browser will take all apparently non-URL form queries to a designated search engine.

Well, it just shows that search engines are becoming more like a doorway to the Internet, a kind of replacement of your browser's address bar.

Google Street View for New Zealand

Finally, it's New Zealand's turn. I don't know whether Google didn't say they'll do New Zealand soon or I didn't notice the news, but if I knew Google was coming, I would definitely erect a huge board, asking Google to do "no index, no follow, no cache" for my property.

Well, I checked my home, not bad, you cannot see anything apart from my fence.

If you live in centres like Auckland or Wellington, I urge you to check your home here to see whether your privacy is at any kind of risk, like this one ... you can make a complaint to google.

Actually the coverage is quite good, except some west coast roads down south and Stewart Island, rest of the New Zealand is pretty much covered.

back in time

As part of Google’s celebration of its 10^th birthday, Google has made its earliest search engine index from January 2001 available to the public. With the help of the Internet Archive, people can revisit those pages even if they are not there anymore.

Sure I believe most of my visitors like you know the Internet Archive bit already – it has archive pages right back to 1996. But I still enjoyed this 2001 search. You need to know the exact URL of the page you wanted before you can access it in Internet Archive, but this Google search does not, just type in the key words you wanted.

This enables you  to do a lot of stuffs ... like check what kind of promises auntie Helen has made back then, or things happening in Afghanistan before the 911. Quite interesting to see how the world was like - blog was pretty much a new concept, SNS has yet been created, and people's hope was still high on Duke Nukem Forever.

Apart from those, it's just fun to revive your good memories.